Ridgeback

Bobby is home with you.

One assistant your whole household shares. It knows who each of you is, keeps what you tell it inside your own walls, and answers the same whether you reach it from the phone in the kitchen or from Discord on a laptop.

Ridgeback is the app. Bobby is the assistant, named after a dog rather than a brand. A ridgeback picks a doorway with a view of the room and lies across it. He learns his household quickly and treats everyone else as an open question. The software keeps his habits.

What Bobby already does.

Sixty-one things, grouped the way a household actually asks for them. Not a roadmap. This is the working set.

  • Keeps the family calendar

    Adds, moves and cancels events, and answers what is coming up. It reads the calendars already on your phone, so Google, iCloud and Outlook all work without connecting an account.

  • Reads and files receipts

    Photograph a receipt and Bobby reads it, files it, and can tell you what a shop has cost you over a month. The reading happens without you typing anything in.

  • Runs the shared lists

    Groceries, errands and reminders that everyone in the house can see and change. A reminder can find one person or the whole household.

  • Backs up your photographs

    Every photo and video off your phone, kept whole. Bobby learns who is in them so you can ask for a person rather than scroll a year.

  • Knows the household

    Who lives here, how they are related, and what you have told it about them. Ask about somebody by name and it knows which one you mean.

  • Knows where things are

    Your address, how far away something is, and what is on the way home. Errands get an order instead of a list.

  • Handles the food question

    Recipes it can read off a web page, and an answer to what you can make with what is already in the house.

  • Is careful around children

    Safe mode belongs to the person, not to a group they are in, so no group you add them to later can switch it off. Spending and outward messages are unavailable, not hidden.

Every one of these is a switch. A household decides which of them Bobby is allowed to do at all, and which people may ask. A tool that is switched off is not offered to Bobby in the first place, so there is nothing to talk him out of.

Bring your own bucket.

Point Ridgeback at storage you own and the photographs land in your account rather than ours. Cloudflare R2, Amazon S3, Backblaze, or a box in your basement.

Owning the bucket means owning the way out. You can leave without a migration, audit what is stored without asking us, and pay for exactly what your household generates. If you would rather not think about it, we hold it and nothing changes.

Your storage key is encrypted the moment it arrives and there is no way to read it back, including for us. Bobby never receives it. When something needs a file, the server hands over a link that works for one file and expires in minutes.

Not open yet

Join the waitlist.

Ridgeback is in private development. Two of the three apps are still being built, and several pieces are designed but not written yet.

Leave an address and we will write when a household shaped like yours can join. Telling us who lives with you decides which households open first.

How would you reach Bobby first? optional

This page is a design prototype. Submitting does not send your address anywhere, and there is no server behind this form.

Honestly

Where Ridgeback actually is.

A site that draws planned features the same way it draws shipped ones is how you end up with the wrong idea of what exists.

Built Accounts, households, invitations, groups, and the walls that keep one house out of another. The Discord bot works today.
In progress The two native apps.
Designed, not built The shared thread across your devices, photos, the parts that run on the phone itself, and the background work that happens while nobody is asking.